CA Agile Central is the cream of the crop
Overall Satisfaction with CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)
It is used primarily in IT by developers and quality control engineers, by business analysts and scrum masters from the PMO and by business product owners. The problem that CA Agile Central solved was providing a solution for an Agile Development and Management Life Cycle that MS Project couldn't provide in 2011.
Pros
- The ability to tailor the tool for each product. For example some simpler projects can be managed with simple user stories, a Kanban process and board. Large projects are managed with iterations, releases, tasks and burn down charts.
- Create a home dashboard and customize it to show user stories and tasks assigned to you and a personal burn down chart.
- A portfolio management capability where you can link and view the entire hierarchy from theme to initiative to feature to user story(s) and finally to tasks.
Cons
- User management is pretty basic and could be better. For example more filters and reports and more ability to do mass updates.
- The report generator is very, very basic and is not WYSIWYG. It has limited filters to generate reports. Often a Scrum master will need to export data to Excel or a tool like Crystal Reports to get enhanced reporting capability.
- Moving from Waterfall to Scrum or Kanban has been a big win for us. The adaptability and customization of CA Agile Central has aided in our success.
- Agile methodologies and CA Agile Central has made it easier to integrate business product owners into an agile team.
The process we used to select a tool was to create a scorecard of IT and Business stakeholder needs. We then reviewed seven tools and graded them against the scorecard requirements. We took the top two products and had a one day hands on demonstration with selected IT and Business stakeholders. We graded them again and selected CA Agile Central based on the overall score.
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